Rational Typist is the program that enables your hands to memorize keyboard layout and speeds up your touch-typing skills. Rational Typist is not a typical typing program, and it is not designed to teach the very first steps e.g. what fingers should type what letters (it does not even have visual keyboard layout being constantly present at its UI). Rational Typist is the program designed to boost your touch typing skills, although, in fact, it can be used by those who have never tried typing with 10 fingers: making your hands to learn own letters is very easy with Rational Typist and soon you don't even need visual keyboard layout.

Its central feature is to help your left and right hands to memorize own range of letters i.e. the letters that are typed whether by left or rights fingers. Therefore Rational Typist introduces left-hand and right-hand words, and also left-to-right (L2R) and right-to-left words (R2L). The first two modes of the program are designed to help your left and right hands to speed up memorizing own range of letters so that letters from arbitrary words your fingers would find easy and fast.

Rational Typist has four modes:

Mode 1: Beginner mode. Designed to train your left and right fingers to memorize their letters with left-only and right-only training words. This mode is also useful when you make a long time break, and your fingers have partially forgotten their training.

Mode 2: This mode is for more experienced users when your fingers make no or little errors in Mode 1 while you don't look at the keyboard. Designed to involve your both left and right hands to type without looking at the keyboard using left-to-right and right-to-left training words.

Mode 3 (Custom words): Designed for advanced users to boost test results by training on problem words. This mode provides you with arbitrarily training words that you pick up by your own in detailed statistics view (Test Mode) after trying the test. For example, you can pick up words in detailed statistics where you've made most typing errors, and spent most time. Rational Typist does not provide default custom list at its install, but you can make it easily after any test.

Test mode (Mode 4): The mode provides you with a sample text to test your typing speed. When finishing with test, you can see test statistics: words per minute (WPM), characters per minute (CPM), typing errors count. In detailed statistics view you can see word-based statistics: time spent, errors count for every word in the test. You can check problem words and create the list of custom training words based on the test results. Mode 3 is used to boost typing performance on these custom words.